Restaurant work is hard. Sometimes it's brutal. Good chefs are monsters, who crush it nightly and put out food that kills the competition and blows people away.

Which all sounds kind of violent. For someone on the receiving end of the food, like me, that's not what eating, and visiting restaurants, is about. It's about being nurtured, fed, taken care of and made happy.

So my interpretation of Bridget and Jeremy Lieb's name for their new restaurant is about that dichotomy. They will be working like beasts, but they know the job of feeding people has a sacred side to it.

Calling a burger or matzo ball soup sacred seems a bit of an exaggeration. But the restaurant follows through on the name. The food is simple, non-egotistical, made to bring attention to itself only by tasting very good. Jeremy Lieb was telling me how they make certain dishes using classic French techniques, but no one otherwise brings attention to this.

It's all served in a comfortable dining room where you can stop by any time and hang out with friends or by yourself. There's delicious chocolate pudding.

And the beast is right there: a team fully visible in the open kitchen, crushing it from lunch through very late at night.

It feels like an upscale diner. The brand-new space at the corner of 15th and Vine is open and light and clean-feeling, with stainless steel in diamond shapes behind the bar and the open kitchen. When I went once recently, my friends and husband were waiting for me in one of the upholstered booths and I felt for a minute like I was at a place I used to hang out with my friends in college, or one of those diner scenes in so many movies. And, since Sacred Beast is open until 1 a.m. during the week and 2:30 a.m. on the weekend, you can hang out exactly like that.

The menu is very simple: I thought I hadn't gotten the second page. It just lists everything you can order without any categorization into appetizers, lunch, breakfast, etc. (there's a separate list for cocktails.) Everything is under $20, and most things are under $15.

We treated it like a Chinese restaurant menu and just ordered a bunch of dishes, mostly to share. You don't have to do that, you could easily choose a dish as an appetizer and another as an entree. But this was fun, and seemed in keeping with the spirit of the place.

Salt-roasted beets are firm and succulent, paired with lots of whipped goat cheese and pistachios. (I've been hearing people say they're tired of beet salad. I will never be tired of a good beet salad.) Matzo ball soup is singular: just one matzo ball. But it's a good light one in a double chicken broth, not the golden broth you would expect, and a bit controversial at our table. The broccoli Caesar is adorable, with broccoli trees served upside down and a rich Caesar dressing. Very nice to share.

Shrimp fries are like poutine, but lighter. They have that same seductive combination of crisp, deep-fried potatoes getting soft in gravy: but with nice, firm little shrimp on top. Excuse me for saying gravy. It's sauce Americaine, a classic lobster sauce made by cooking the shells into a seafood essence, deglazed with Cognac and Madeira. Oh, and a little mornay, and some creme fraiche and chives to dip the fries into.

Frites also come with beef tartare; a pile of skin-on, skinny crunchy frites, a pile of diced raw beef and a little manchego next to it with a pickled egg yolk to break into it.

Turmeric chicken is lightly-fried and curried boneless thighs, which means they stay moist, on top of long sticks of cucumber in a sweet Thai-reminiscent marinade.

I ordered a double burger, which meant I got three patties of loosely packed, tender beef. They're on a perfect burger bun, though I admit I'm in the minority when it comes to tastes in burger buns. This one is light, but not soft and squishy or sweet. It holds the burger together and gets out of the way as you eat it. Nothing else much gets in the way, either, just some mayo and American cheese, with its waxy unpretentious texture that melts so beautifully on a burger that it's hard to justify using something fancier.

There's a breakfast with rich, soft scrambled eggs that make you realize everyone else is doing them wrong, tender ricotta pancakes and fried pork belly: very satisfying. The omelet is another beautiful treatment of eggs: a smooth surface, perfect yellow color, tender to the fork, with a piquillo pepper and goat cheese oozing out. The simple vinaigrette-dressed Bibb salad on the side tastes exactly like my mother's, and I hold her salad sacred.

The chocolate pudding is lovely (and nothing like my mother's, who made hers from a box just like most moms) topped with an inch and a half of whipped cream. The peanut butter pudding is denser, and has a layer of jam-like strawberry compote under its topping of whipped cream.

I think people will not be so much talking about Sacred Beast in terms of "Those shrimp fries were life-changing!" or "They really killed it with that burger!" I think, though, that when they're thinking of meeting up with a friend, or going out with a group from the office, getting a bite after a show, having a more-special-than-usual breakfast, going on a first date, they will go through a list of different places in their mind, and then remember Sacred Beast would be perfect for any of those things.